There is a correlation between losing sleep and losing memories. It’s humorous for me to think that Ronald Reagan once said, “We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.” An owl is an owl is an owl. “High and tight,” “shuck and jive,” “bread and circuses,” and “smoke and mirrors” are all examples of Siamese Twins.

Fun fact about The Ides: It’s the 15th day of the month, but only in March, May, July, and October. In every other month, it’s the 13th of the month. The Roman calendar is really so weird.

All this talk of soothsaying and foretelling has me thinking… Here at Counterforce, when we’re not complaining about shit, we’re typically just slicing up bits of our subconscious, things that we like from all over the place, and sharing them with you. Sometimes it’s planned, and sometimes it happens on a deadly whim, but I wonder… Perhaps we should be planning and sharing what we’re planning more beforehand, teasing you a bit… Hmm. Maybe, right?

Or, more dangerously, just throwing out random things at the start of a month, or any time period, and then talking about them at some point, in some way. Maybe the topics are user generated, or just things the author knows nothing about but have always been abstractly interested in, I don’t know. And then they go off and learn something about that topic, or maybe they don’t. But they find an angle and attack it. Maybe it’s predictive blogging, maybe it’s something else.

OR! And this, this right here, is insane, but let me start earlier… at work, sometimes, when we’re bored, my co-workers and I will play a game, a silly, stupid game that we call “The Wikipedia game.” We generate a large group of topics and subjects, then you pick two randomly. You go to one of those topic/subject’s wikipedia pages, and utilizing only links on that page, you have to, in five clicks or seven clicks (or whatever) or less, you have to arrive at the second topic you picked. Think “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” but more infotastic and time wasting. Mind you, I”m just talking out loud here, so maybe this is lame, but what if blogging was like that?

Tarkovsky was a director who let the moving images of his stories dictate his filmmaking, and whose plots tended to drift into poetry and the hidden ghosts dancing through the fire and water motifs (which is more natural and not as annoying as, say, John Woo and the fucking doves) of his subconscious tended to wander about the landscapes he so expertly conveyed. I can see a lot of similarities, not just with Bergman, who Tarkovsky greatly admired, but also with filmmakers still operating today, like Béla Tarr. Of Tarkovsky, Bergman said, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

And Tarkovsky’s films have always looked to me as if they were filmed on location inside of dreams. They’re not always pretty, but they’re not exactly ugly either. They don’t conform. Time doesn’t always flow as you think it should. Things happen, whether you understand the reasons or not, and sometimes events can get away from you.

Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker, who’d previously done the short film La Jetée, which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s excellent 12 Monkeys.

The film is an experiment take on the documentary and the travelogue as a ficticious filmmaker sends footage and letters back to a woman, who narrates/shares with us his thoughts. It moves from place to place, not really concerned with narrative, and spends some time in Japan, Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco, where it pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing Vertigo, probably my favorite film ever.

The film deals a lot with the ideas of travel and loneliness and memory (“remembering is not the opposite of forgetting“) and the idea that our memories can be replaced with film as a document, amongst other things. This is one of those movies I put on when I want to relax and it never fails to do the trick.

The English version of the film opens with this quote from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:

“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place”

Marker’s an enigmatic and reclusive filmmaker, mostly sticking to the documentary form, and careful to never let himself become the subject of the story. He refuses to do interviews and when he’s asked for a picture of himself, he instead sends along a picture of his cat, Guillaume. But that’s another story for another time. I’ll leave you with live footage of Blonde Redhead performing their song “Ego Maniac Kid” in front of a project of Marker’s Battle Of Ten Million…

The other night I was reading an interesting big on a variant of the Fermi paradox, but dealing with time travel, and I really wished I had saved the link. The Fermi paradox, by the way, is contradiction of… Well, if there are aliens out there, higher civilizations, or at least something more advanced than class 1 or 2 civilization and capable of traveling between worlds, then why haven’t we been contacted them (and no, abducting wack jobs and cattle and anal probing the hell out of them is not “contact,” no matter how right it’s done). Essentially the same idea applies to time travel: If people could come back from the future, then why haven’t they?

Especially if you think about how a person from a few decades in the future could travel back with the common cold from their time period to now, when we don’t have those several decades worth of immunities, and do some serious damage.

Oh well. I guess that just leaves us angry time travelers, all stuck going forward only and at the same speed.

All right, you primates, listen up…

I’m from the future, man. And I’m high!

Come with me if you want to talk about groping and economic reform in hard times.

Now is the era of the end of excess. If you’ll excuse me, I’m just gonna go slip into my little time machine and go back in time (and maybe buy some Apple stock or something). Catch you in another time, another place.

Disclaimer

Counterforce is dedicated to excellence and enjoyment in the audio and visual. Music is posted for a short sampling period and then removed. If you are the copyright owner of something on this page, send an email to counterforce01 at gmail dot com and tell us what you want to hear. Or not hear (i.e. have removed). The same address works perfectly for inflating our egos, hate mailing us, or inquiring about where to send donations.

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.